Absence assistance systems to date have a central absence assistance unit, for example a voicemail server unit arranged centrally within a communication system, by way of which media-specific management takes place, for example by voice services, of the multimedia communication connections received in the absence of the communication subscriber in question. Such central solutions are however technically complex and require cost-intensive server units, which can develop a performance-limiting bottleneck due to their central arrangement in the communication system.
Multimedia-enabled communication systems respectively support one or more multimedia services, which allow multimedia communication, i.e. the setting up of multimedia communication connections by way of different media transmission channels. Examples of such multimedia services that should be mentioned here are voice services, data services, audio services, video services, information services and program communication services.
The different multimedia services are generally implemented with the aid of specific communication protocols. The provision of such multimedia services places high demands on the performance capacity of the corresponding communication facilities, in particular their absence assistance systems, due to the high data throughput rates and required storage capacities.
Peer-to-peer communication networks are also known, in which data communication takes place according to the peer-to-peer transmission protocol. In contrast to client/server architectures, in a communication network based on peer-to-peer technology every computer can be a peer that can function as client and server at the same time. A peer-to-peer communication network can be one of two types—a pure or hybrid peer-to-peer communication network. The pure variant has no centralized entities, while with the hybrid solution one (or a small number of linked) directory server unit(s) is/are provided in the communication system, providing an additional network service.